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Libya attacks review singles out ambassador

Hannah Allam

Casualty … US ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the attack. Photo: AP

WASHINGTON: Three State Department officials resigned on Wednesday after an independent panel severely criticised the ''grossly inadequate'' security arrangements at a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

But perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of the panel's review of the deadly attacks on September 11 was that part of the blame for security lapses lay with the incident's most prominent casualty: the ambassador, Chris Stevens.

The Accountability Review Board's report, released on Tuesday and the subject of congressional hearings this week, praised Mr Stevens as ''an exceptional practitioner of modern diplomacy''.

However, the report suggested on numerous pages Mr Stevens had failed to respond seriously to deteriorating security around him in the months before the attacks, in which he and three other Americans were killed.

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As chief of mission for Libya, the report's authors said, Mr Stevens would have been the authority on the dangers posed to US interests by the various local militias roaming the city - a threat the report says was inadequately taken into consideration by officials in Tripoli and Washington.

The two top officials on the review board, the retired ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired admiral Michael Mullen, chose their words carefully at a news conference on Wednesday, saying Mr Stevens did support having more security personnel. But they also said he was the ultimate authority on the deteriorating local security conditions.

''As the chief of mission, he certainly had a responsibility in that regard, and actually he was very security-conscious and increasingly concerned about security,'' Admiral Mullen said. ''But part of his responsibility is certainly to make that case back here, and he had not gotten to that point where you would, you might get to a point where you would be considering, 'It's so dangerous, we might close the mission'.''

The report of the review board, appointed by the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is more pointed in its suggestions Mr Stevens shared in what the authors painted as a security breakdown at the US consulate in Benghazi.

The embassy Mr Stevens oversaw in Tripoli ''did not demonstrate strong and sustained advocacy with Washington for increased security'' in Benghazi.

Plans for his trip from the Tripoli embassy to the Benghazi consulate were not properly shared with the security team, ''who were not fully aware of planned movements off compound''. And the review board wrote that Mr Stevens simply did not envision such a scenario at the Benghazi compound, despite attacks against diplomatic targets that northern spring and summer.

Two of the attacks involved homemade explosives lobbed at the US compound in Benghazi, with one of them blowing a large hole in an outside wall. But Mr Stevens's status as an expert on Libya, the report said, ''caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments''.

Among the panel's recommendations were consultations with outside, non-governmental experts on the risks in high-threat areas and a reorganised security structure that would allow regional agents to report directly to superiors in Washington. These two measures would appear to prevent a situation in which an ambassador had unchecked authority over local security matters.

After the report was released three State Department officials stepped down, underscoring the sensitivity of the episode on the US government's diplomatic bureaucracy. The officials who resigned were Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security; Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security; and Raymond Maxwell, a deputy assistant secretary responsible for North Africa.